The present invention relates to a technique for image analysis using an optical-electronic, hybrid device.
The instant invention utilizes the advantages gained by the parallel (global) operational capabilities of optics and the flexibility of electronics. It has been estimated that such a hybrid device would offer at least a factor of ten improvement in computational speed over an equivalent electronic device. Potential applications include final target identification, aim point selection for interceptors, target identification and classification for surveillance systems and robotics vision systems.
In general, most prior art systems use some form of look-up table procedure for recognizing input images. The look-up procedure is essentially an exhaustive search of a set of all possible fixed filters that describe an input image. As this search must include the basic image as well as all of the possible rotations, both in and out of plane, and image scale changes, the search must necessarily be very large.